25 December 21
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In the face of the failure of narrative to make sense of life, she found meaning in the particular.
Didion worried about this, too, as a young writer. Not being serious. There is a particular flavor to the anxiety of people from the West trying to learn the intellectual shorthand of the East. Didion, at the University of California, Berkeley, believed that the way to prove herself serious was to “try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic,” or to write ten thousand words on “whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in ‘Paradise Lost.’ ” She tried, she wrote, “to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.” Why, instead, was she drawn to the phenomena of the world, the lights of the Bevatron blinking on the Berkeley hillside? The lights were not, she insisted, meant to stand in for some geopolitical sentiment, some “shorthand about the military industrial-complex.” It was just the lights, blinking up there, and whatever impulse inside her that wanted to write about the lights.
“In short,” she said, “I tried to think. I failed.”
So much of Didion’s writing is about the formless nature of our lives and the inability of “thinking” to get us anyplace new. The way the days accrue without any inherent purpose, how the possibility for cruelty simmers under our intimate relationships. The gap between our archetypes and reality, the dreamy songs of true love and white dresses juxtaposed with the black eye. What Henry James called the ultimate human theme: “the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt.” There are no good guys, no heroes, and whatever meaning we find is entirely self-imposed. What to write in the face of that chaos? If trying to think herself out of it didn’t work, what else for Didion to do than pin down the world as she saw it, follow the images that have that internal urgency, what she called a “shimmer”? How else to make sense of a world without any intrinsic narrative, no teleological release?
Didion saw what she wanted to see—of course. That’s the point. That’s being a writer. The images she was drawn to made up the constellation of her noticing, created her singular vocabulary. That’s sensibility. It’s not a political report, it’s not a class analysis, it’s not a paper on Milton’s themes. Didion recorded how certain arrangements of people or landscapes looked to her eye, how these images struck an inner chord. Do we want to believe that there’s some deeper truth to be accessed by the writer, that they can offer us some coherent meaning? Didion didn’t seem to think so, even in her works of nonfiction. Before her book “Miami” was published, she made sure that her editor removed the jacket copy that called it investigative journalism. That disavowal doesn’t need to take anything away from her work—of course she’s thinking deeply, of course she’s using the full force of her intelligence. But the lens was always personal.
Maybe Didion would agree with DeLillo, after all—certainly she would understand a premonition of imminent doom, a tidal wave about to clear the beach of all its happy pleasure-seekers. But it would be strange to believe that her work, populated with images from her relentless noticing, is superficial, or lessened by her insistence that attempts to form images into theses or fables is suspect.
And maybe what I’ve written here is in opposition to what I’ve said above, the exact kind of suspect attempt to create meaning. A belief that, in fewer than a thousand words, I could offer shape to anyone else’s work. Or that some version of Eastern seriousness—the Henry James quote!—could make the attempt more weighty.
I don’t know. I loved her writing. It was important to me. Certain images of hers will never leave me. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, as writers. These flares of how the world appeared to us echoing inside someone else. This is what I saw, this is what I noticed, this is the message I sent out to the ether, like a flash of the Bevatron.
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